Even his biggest detractors admit that Sinofsky has world-class skills when it comes to delivering high quality, massive scale software projects on time. One critic called him a “genius.” Another admitted he was “brilliant.”

Holding up 7 fingers for Windows 7. Or maybe that's a 52 -- the age he'll probably be when Steve Ballmer retires.Fukapon via Flickr

“He’s a brilliant guy when it comes to leading a process and shipping on a regular schedule. He did a great job coming over to Windows, cleaning up the mess that was Vista, and turning that into Windows 7, which has been a huge success.”

Another former executive says that Sinofsky is exactly what Microsoft needs.

“Steven devised a strategy to return to excellence. Period. It makes people uncomfortable, but I think the results speak for themselves. Most people cannot imagine the scale and complexity of that project [Windows]. It is building the fucking pyramids. It is the digital equivalent of one of the world's wonders.”

So what is the Sinofsky way, exactly? Here are some hallmarks:

Quality and predictability over features. Sinofsky values quality releases and timing over adding features. If a feature is taking too long to get right, Sinofsky will cut it — even if it’s a feature that customers have demanded or that competitors already have.

Because timing is so important, Sinofsky has no tolerance for underlings who overpromise and underdeliver. Or, for that matter, the opposite — if you deliver more than you said you would, he’ll assume you were softpadding your expectations to look better, and ask you to be more accurate next time.

Predictability is king.

Data driven. One person who used to be part of Microsoft Research told us that Sinofsky hates the small focus groups that a lot of other Microsoft product leaders use to design products.

“He’s a champion of large-scale data projects,” this person says. “This is commonplace on the Web, where everything’s on the server side and you can track everything on the Web, but in packaged software it’s actually quite unorthodox.“

This is seen in Sinofsky’s love of Watson, a Microsoft technology that tracks the errors users are seeing, then lets users report those errors back to Microsoft.

In his book “One Strategy,” Sinofsky calls Watson “simply the biggest innovation in computer science in the last 10 years. I don’t say that lightly and I mean computer science.”

The “triad.” This is probably the biggest change, and the one that has caused the most conflict.

At Microsoft, software development is organized into three functions: developers who write code, testers who test it, and program managers who determine specs.

Previously, employees in these three functions all reported to “feature leaders.” These feature leaders coordinated all the features so they were finished at the same time and worked properly together. They reported to a product leader, who in turn would report to a product group leader, and so on up the chain.

Sinofsky at the launch of Windows 7 in Japan.Microsoft

Under Sinofsky, most of these mid-level managers are gone. Basically, dev, test, and program management all report up to the senior leader of the product, or in some cases the senior leader of the entire product group — like Sinofsky.

Sinofsky has been clear about his distaste for too much middle management. As he put it in a 2005 blog post: “We’ve built SharePoint from the ground up within our team, and done so without any middle managers coming in and trying to gum things up. “

This may sound great from the outside — Microsoft’s bloated bureaucracy was one reason why the company got so slow.

But it eliminated opportunities for career advancement and gave more power to the executives who were already in the most senior positions. That has driven a lot of experienced people out of the company.

As one former engineer explains, there’s no role in a Sinofsky organization for architects who think about strategy — if you don’t want to manage people, you have to write code, test products, or come up with specs. “So at the upper tier, people are under severe pressure to find roles they consider appropriate. That’s what’s driving a lot of senior guys away.”

Another former Microsoftie told us that Amazon, in particular, is benefiting from this migration.

Agile but not “agile.” In a lot of ways, the Sinofsky method is the polar opposite of the “agile” software development method used by Facebook, Amazon, and many tech companies viewed as innovative.

Agile development organizes groups into small teams — as small as two people — each of which works on a specific backlog associated with the product. As those backlogs are eliminated, the product slowly comes together. Teams move quickly from task to task, taking no longer than a few weeks and sometimes shifting in mid-stream, and can be broken down and recompiled with different members.

The Sinofsky method is quite different: A product leader sets the product vision early on, then large teams set off on a well-defined course to reach that vision. It's more "measure twice, cut once" with "very discrete stages," says a former exec who approves of his methods.

Sinofsky doesn’t have much patience for people who complain his methods aren't “agile” enough.

In one blog post, he explains how the Office team decided to build a note-taking application, OneNote, without seeking meetings or approval from any outsiders.

“If you have an organization that can develop a brand new product and bring it to market in 2 years without any ‘approval’ then I would say this is an agile organization. On the other hand, if you proposed something that didn’t get built by the organization then I can assure you that you will quickly become a spokesperson for why the organization lacks agility. “

No silly time-wasters. Microsoft employees who hate this process can at least take solace that Sinofsky has little patience for the kind of scripted events that make “The Office” so uncomfortable to watch.

“We got all sorts of weird instructions like no mobile phones or food, some folks had to arrive (at a small campground-like environment on Cape Cod) a day early. It was all spooky and I was super uncomfortable. Using analogies of today, it was like The Apprentice meets Survivor or something, except there were no lucrative endorsements waiting for us after we finished …. Without going into too many details, suffice it to say that a group of Microsoft people managed to ‘break’ the simulation. We had the ‘facilitators’ in tears and ended the game two days early. It was torture. I swore off all HR-related activities for about 5 years after that.”

Not 24/7. Sinofsky also believes in work-life balance, and thinks the 24/7 life of startups and some competitors (Amazon is often named) is a huge mistake.

“Anyone who tells you how cool it is to pull all-nighters on commercial software or anyone who says ‘I live at the office’ and means it, is really someone I would not want checking code into my project. To be blunt, there is no way you can do quality work if you do not give your brain a break … If a company is driving you to work crazy hours like this, either because you want to or they want you to, it is just uncool.”